Approximate Reading time – 25min

When I signed up with my supply teaching agencies at the beginning of the year, I had two very explicit instructions: 

1. No teens, preteens or anything remotely related to teens. (People always comment on how much patience I must have working with children, but let me set the record straight: I definitely do not have the patience to deal with raging adolescent hormones. (God Bless all you parents that live with teenagers!)
2. And for the love of God, please, please do not put me in a nursery. Having tried working in a Nursery a couple of times about 15 years ago, I was absolutely adamant that I wouldn’t be able to survive the boredom ever again. I mean let’s face it, they are cute and all, but the thought of spending a whole day surrounded by needy, overly dependent little munchkins was my idea of a living hell.

Unfortunately, what I hadn’t factored into my steadfast “DO NOT WANT” list was the fact that having just relocated to a new country would mean I might need to suck it up and just take whatever work I was offered! (Especially if I wanted to eat!) So when I was offered two days of nursery I reluctantly agreed. I have to admit….in contrast to my previous experience of working with the little minnie people…I actually had a lot of fun. One of the comments from the cutest little Indian boy that I was playing with, in the playground, was “You are not a teacher, you are a big child.” Too true, maybe it took me 15-plus years to let the inner child in me free. At the end of the week, a different agency messaged me and asked me if I would consider a short-term nursey post, till the end of the school year, and I said yes. 

So I have recently finished 6 months of work in a Church of England school and I have come away from this whole experience with such a heightened appreciation and respect for these tiny little humans. I have taught for 20 years and have been a learning support teacher for the last 8 years so I like to consider myself reasonably well educated in the basics of child psychology. I am aware that most experts consider the first five years of a child’s life as fundamentally important. While my logical head has always understood this, it wasn’t until I actually experienced working with this age group that I truly grasped the irrefutable significance of this time in a child’s life. This is the age that you literally need to program them like little computers. There is just so much that we need to download into them, self-love, creativity, kindness, confidence, courage and strong beliefs in all that they can achieve. But most importantly we need to make sure that we download a stable foundation for helping them to understand and regulate their emotions so that, above all, they can be resilient to all the ups and downs that life will throw at them. (I know right, it’s a pretty hefty responsibility!😯)

This is also the age when children look to adults like they are superheroes who can literally do no wrong. The saddest thing is that often when we do make mistakes, these tiny tots do not have the emotional maturity to know that what they witnessed was not healthy behaviour or that our anger and frustration often has very little to do with them. I have honestly never in my entire 20 years of teaching felt as openly watched as I have been in the last 6 months and I have come up with a few lessons which I would love to share with you.😊

Appreciate their small treasures and learn to listen to their stories 

I think one of the reasons that I previously hated working in the nursery, when I was younger, was because I didn’t quite understand the importance of valuing little people’s stories or treasuring little people’s valuables. As a young teacher, I never had the patience or the awareness to actually slow down and listen to what they were trying to share with me. Oh, I’m pretty sure I feigned listening on a superficial level….but I am almost certain I didn’t listen with my heart. This time around I made a concerted effort to be more aware, more present and more willing to engage with them on a daily basis. Granted with 22 children you will never have enough time to listen to all of them all of the time, but I certainly did my best. One of my favourite parts of the day was when the children would arrive in the morning. What started out as one or two children bringing toys into school became a daily ritual of me being handed cars, fluffy toys, hairless-naked barbie dolls, little picked flowers, a scrap of wallpaper (from her mummies new lounge), a 2p coin (just for me), a large leaf, homemade biscuits, various other bizarre trinkets, and random little pieces of artwork.

The beauty of small children is that they have such wonder, delight and joy when it comes to the tiniest of things and every single day all they want to do is share that joy with us. This is the age where most children are just brimming with excitement and hopefulness for life. They believe in fairies and dragons and all things creative and wonderful, and all they want to do is tell you about it. I think we miss out on so much that they have to offer when we don’t find the time to just stop, listen and be interested. When we take this time to engage with them on this level we are teaching them two very important messages:

1. What you value in your life is important and it is worthy of my time. 
2. I am always interested in what you have to share with me. (Nothing is ever too silly or stupid.)

Own up, when you fuck up!

One of the things that I absolutely loved about working with kids is that, for me, they are excellent mood stabilizers. (No seriously, they are! 😂) I absolutely love being around children and on the odd occasions that I don’t feel my usual chipper self they somehow always manage to pull me out of my funk. All I need to do is sit down and see those gorgeous little faces smiling at me and life just feels great again! On one particular day, right towards the end of the term, this was, unfortunately, NOT the case. I was in the worse possible mood ever. Just before school started I had realised that we were breaking up a week earlier than I had actually planned for. Now while this might sound like something to be thrilled about, if you are a supply teacher, it is most definitely not. It meant that my entire summer holiday budget, that was just going to be enough to survive on, was now going to be plus-minus 500 pounds short. I was beside myself with panic and rage for making such a careless mistake. My free-floating anxiety was through the roof. With no time to process and regulate my emotions, I found I could barely even smile at the children that morning when I sat down to do the register. I have a vague memory of running through their names like a drill sergeant and 22 little pairs of eyes looking at me in utter confusion. (Who was this morose, grumpy woman and what has she done with their teacher?😯). I then spent most of the morning snapping irritably at the kids and my breaking point came around snack time. We had made cupcakes the day before and each child’s edible had been named. At the end of snack time, as usual, SOMEONE had left their cupcake wrapper on the floor.

I was ENRAGED….every single day, like clockwork some little bugger forgets to pick up their banana peels/apples cores/milk carton. I routinely manage to stay calm and employ the guilty party to please come to pick up their refuse. Of course, you can ask till you are blue in the face….BUT they know…yes THEY KNOW without an eyewitness YOU CAN’T PROVE A THING!!

BUT

that day…..oh my God…I had them! For once I had the upper hand! That cupcake wrapper HAD A NAME ON IT!!! So I asked them who the wrapper belonged to?

Silence

I then shouted a DIRE warning: “That wrapper has a name on it! If the person who it belongs to doesn’t own up NOW and come pick it up I am going to put them in the time-out chair for 2 min! Now I will admit, this was extreme even for me. The time out chair was seldom used in my class. You only really landed up there if you hurt another child or were rude to a teacher. (The time out chair was serious stuff, ya’all!! NO-ONE wants to be there!)

As I issued this ultimatum I felt a tinge of shame for this over-the-top consequence but EVER so slightly more jubilant that I would finally have caught the little litterbug culprit. I snatched up that cupcake wrapper only to see that the name on there wasn’t any of the children I might have initially suspected. In fact, it was one of the sweetest, quietest boys in the class who is always impeccably well behaved and sits on the carpet staring at me with his beautiful, big eyes for most of the day. He had never even come close to being put in time out. I was mortified…but I knew I had to follow through! (Inconsistency is a killer when it comes to working with children) 

So I reluctantly put him in time out. (It was only for two minutes) After a minute he burst into tears and I felt like the absolute worst teacher EVER! Over a cupcake wrapper? Was I insane? I feel like I have spent the last 20 years as a teacher learning how to regulate my own emotions in the classroom so that I don’t have to rely on shouting or yelling to get my point across or issuing out punishments that most certainly don’t fit the crimes. I will admit I have had some horrendous shame-inducing-shouting moments in my early days as a newly qualified teacher. (As have most teachers) I absolutely cringe when I think back on them. (Silent prayer of gratitude I didn’t have my own kids in my 20’s.) But these days I am genuinely proud of the fact that I am a pretty good disciplinarian and have mostly mastered the art of arbitration without yelling. Thank God I am all grown- up. (Damn that fucking cup-cake-wrapper!!😂) Luckily the whole cup-cake debacle snapped me out of my funk and back into the land of the reasonable. I was able to have a good chat with my little angel child after he had done his ‘hard time‘ and I reminded him that he was a pretty awesome little litterbug. 

The next morning when I was feeling my usual self again, I had to apologise to all my students. I confessed that yesterday a crazy, angry woman had come and taught them….had they noticed? Little heads nodded vigorously. One tiny smart arse shouts out: “No it was you!” He was right. I did my best to explain that I had been in a very grumpy mood but that it had absolutely nothing to do with any of them. The problem with small children is that they are so self-absorbed. (It’s called the terrible twos for nothing) They literally live in this tiny world that revolves around them, their needs, their wants and their happiness. They haven’t yet reached the maturity level to understand that the majority of things that happen in life often have very little to do with them. It’s our jobs as adults to teach them this. While it is perfectly human for our emotions to get the better of us at various moments in time, the true lesson for me has always been learning to own up to my lapse in self-control and apologise for it. I want my students to know how powerful those three little words: “I am sorry” truly can be. When we model compassion, understanding and taking responsibility for ourselves and our own emotions, our children will learn to emulate this.

Just for the record routinely screaming and shouting at children and then apologising is not the same thing. Many years ago I worked with the loveliest of teachers, who truly adored her students and was in many ways a very loving teacher. The only problem was that at least once/twice a day she would absolutely lose it with her class. I can’t even begin to describe how infuriating it was to hear her regularly declare, after her rampages of rage, that she was sorry she had needed to shout but that she only shouted at them because she ‘loved’ them. Like seriously? I’ll be honest, it used to make my blood curdle when I’d hear her continually explain away her uncontrolled behaviour by misusing the word ‘love’. I wish I had been strong enough then to stand up and call her on this bullshit. Love is not the underlying emotion fuelling anger and rage. Love is often the justification we use to excuse it. 

What many people don’t realise is that anger can often simply be a secondary emotion. What this means is that it can be a mask for the more primary emotions that are initially felt in a situation such as sadness and fear. Fear, in turn, can include a whole of emotions such as sadness, worry, disappointment etc. Take for example a mother waiting for her child who is late coming home from school. Her initial primary emotion when he doesn’t turn up on time is one of fear and maybe worry. What could have happened to him? Is he hurt? When the child finally turns up, those primary emotions can often be overtaken by the secondary emotion of anger. The poor mother who has been beside herself with worry suddenly snaps and ends up yelling at the child, which might then lead to her feeling more secondary emotions such as guilt and shame. When the mother eventually calms down, an unhealthy response might include an apology (If the child is lucky) lumped with a large dollop of blame.

eg “You make me so angry”

“You are always late ”

“You are so irresponsible!”

Blame shifts the responsibility away from yourself, making the child responsible for your actions. Quite simply they are not. I have come to realise through my years of teaching that no matter how naughty a child or a class are, how I choose to react to them is ultimately always my responsibility. Bad behaviour from them doesn’t warrant bad behaviour from me. 

On the other hand, the healthier response to this knee-jerk overreaction might be the mother simply identifying the primary emotion that she was feeling at the time: “I’m sorry I shouted at you I just felt really fearful and worried about you.” No blame, just the honest truth about her feelings. Unfortunately what often stops us from being truthful about our primary emotions is: 

a) we often aren’t even conscious and aware of them

b) they make us feel uncomfortable, vulnerable and often like we are not in control. Our fear of other people perhaps rejecting or berating us for our feelings often means that we can become accustomed to keeping them hidden.

As explained by Matthew Tull (PhD) One way we hide our feelings is by subconsciously shifting into anger mode.  In contrast to fear and sadness, anger can provide a surge of energy and that makes you feel more in charge, rather than feeling vulnerable or helpless.  Essentially, anger can be a means of creating a sense of control and power in the face of vulnerability and uncertainty. 

Overall I was relatively grateful for this experience that I had with my students. For starters, it reminded me of how far I have come as a teacher and how these days I am mostly able to discipline my students using calmer and more positive ways and techniques. (Except for those odd occasions when I’m not!😉 ) But most importantly it was such a good reminder for me of how quickly fear and worry can transmute into anger and how it is often those around us that bear the brunt of this. (Mmmm….I will keep working on that one!) 

To be continued…..